Murder in Nice (37 page)

“
What are you talking
about? You were popular.”

“
I was
lonely
. Turn around. I hear forensics
these days are pretty good about being able to tell which way you
were facing when you fell, even in a backwater like France I
imagine. I don’t want them saying you were pushed.”

Maggie turned to face the foyer, her arms by
her side. The stairs were slick and steep. She stared down them,
her mind whirling in frantic circles. An unbidden flash of memory
came to her of Ben, her and Elise sitting at the top of the stairs
on Christmas morning. She could hear her brother and sister
whispering and laughing. She could smell the pine needles of the
Christmas tree in the living room below.

“
Oh,” Haley said, “I forgot
the clothes basket. It’s right there off to your right, but I need
your fingerprints on it, Maggie, especially since I haven’t seen
you touch the basket in a few days. So if you would kindly do the
honors.”

Maggie turned to see the laundry basket a
couple feet from her. “You want me to…”

“
You know what I want you
to do,” Haley said, impatiently. “May I remind you it is not very
comfortable where Jemmy is and the longer you wait—stop it!” Haley
shook Zouzou, who was in the process of throwing a full-blown
tantrum, the knife slipping out of position for the few seconds
Haley needed to reposition the squirming child.

A few seconds were all Maggie needed.

She hurled herself at Haley, grabbing for
the knife and pushing Zouzou away at the same time. The child
shrieked and fell from Haley’s grasp but Maggie didn’t have time to
see if she was hurt.

“
Cut me,” Maggie panted as
she grappled with Haley’s knife hand, “and nobody will believe it
was an accident. Bitch.”

Maggie fought to push past
the pain of her injured wrist. An image of Jemmy crying, afraid,
came roaring into her head and the outrage it triggered blazed
through Maggie like wildfire.
How dare you
hurt my child!

She gave one last surge of strength and
wrenched the knife out of Haley’s hands. Haley stared at her empty
hand and then at Maggie with astonishment.

“
Where is he?” Maggie
screamed, holding the knife as if ready to bring it down on
Haley.

“
Go ahead and kill me!”
Haley yelled, her face twisted into a visage of pain and grief.
“He’ll die without me!” Haley turned and bolted for the
stairs.

“
Don’t you do it!” Maggie
yelled, grabbing Haley’s arm. But Maggie’s uninjured hand was
holding the knife, and Haley easily twisted free.

The front door flung open, crashing with a
loud bang against the foyer wall. Laurent filled the doorway and
Maggie watched him look toward the living room before seeing
movement at the top of the stairs.

He charged for the stairs just as Haley
launched into the air. Maggie watched in horror as she plummeted,
arms windmilling desperately as if she’d changed her mind, as if to
stop her terrible plunge. She fell in slow motion, graceful and
macabre, her scream aborted harshly when she hit the ancient tiles
of the lower steps with a sickening thud that reverberated through
the bare halls of the house.

“
Haley, no!” Ben screamed,
pushing past Laurent. Haley lay halfway down, her legs twisted
behind her on the higher steps.

Laurent looked up at Maggie on the upper
landing and she saw his face flush with relief. Ben pulled Haley’s
broken body into his arms, making soft, guttural noises. Sounds
Maggie never heard her brother make before.

“
Laurent,” Maggie said
urgently, “she’s taken Jemmy and put him somewhere.” She knelt next
to Zouzou, who was curled up on the floor, her thumb in her mouth
but finally silent.

“
Call an ambulance!” Ben
screamed at them. “For the love of God.”

Laurent bounded up the steps, touching
Maggie on the shoulder to confirm she was all in one piece and then
scooped up Zouzou. Maggie watched the child wrap her arms around
his neck and bury her face in his chest. He looked at Maggie. She
had never seen such fear in his eyes before, and for a moment it
robbed her of her strength before she felt the beginnings of an
unholy fury descend upon her.

“
She said it’s some place
where he can’t stay for long,” Maggie said as she hurried down the
steps and crouched near Ben. She ignored her brother’s anguished
face and focused on Haley. Ben had pulled her around so that her
head and shoulders rested against his chest, but the blood where
she had lain was pooled and thick. Maggie saw that Haley was
unconscious.

Just as
well
.
She wouldn’t
tell me anyway.

Maggie picked up Haley’s hands. They were
bloody from the wine bottle shard she’d held in the kitchen, and
from Zouzou’s scratches. She looked at Haley’s fingernails.
Polished, with bits of skin under them.

Likely
mine
, Maggie thought, standing and looking
at the body, forcing herself to take her time, not to rush,
to think
. She was aware of
Laurent behind her on the stairs. He was breathing hard, his body
radiating an energy that seemed to vibrate in the air around him
but she couldn’t look at him. She needed to focus on what Haley
could tell her.

She knelt down again and touched Haley’s
knee. A bloody, white bone pierced free of the linen slacks she
wore.

“
Leave her alone! Don’t
touch her!” Ben snarled, trying to push Maggie away. “Somebody call
an ambulance!”

“
I was asleep for two
hours,” Maggie said. “And when I awoke, Haley was heating up dinner
in the kitchen.” She reran the scene in her mind, trying to block
out Ben’s words, Zouzou’s renewed whimpering, and the ever-present
temptation to break down at the thought of never seeing her child
again.

Maggie fast-forwarded to the moment when she
knew Haley was Lanie’s killer. She saw the broken bits of green
wine bottle and the wet mess surrounding it on the kitchen floor.
Not just purple as it should have been in Laurent’s spotless
kitchen, but dark brown. Among the spilled wine were bits of mud.
Maggie grabbed one of Haley’s feet, ignoring Ben’s protests.

The tread of the shoe had a thin layer of
mud on it.

“
She took him outside,”
Maggie said, standing up. “She drugged him so he wouldn’t cry, and
took him outside.”

“
The well,” Laurent said,
turning and rocketing out of the room through the French doors.
Maggie ran behind him, stopping only long enough to snatch up the
flashlight they kept by the door for when she let Petit Four
out.

As soon as she ran through the door, Maggie
saw it was raining. Hard. She directed the beam of light in front
of Laurent. He still carried Zouzou in his arms, his long legs
pulling farther and farther ahead of her.

Maggie saw the well come into view at the
edge of the vineyard, a ghostly dark stump in the gloom of
night.

How long ago had she put
him there? Three hours ago?
The well would
fill up after every rainfall.
Did Haley
know that? Is that why she said he only had a short time until he
died?

Laurent was at the well now. She watched him
set Zouzou on the ground and begin to pry the boards off the top.
She ran to him, breathless and drenched from the rain.

“
Jemmy! Jemmy!” she
screamed as she picked up Zouzou, the child shivering in the rain
even though the night was warm.

She stepped back as Laurent threw boards behind him until he
had a big enough hole to peer into.

“
Jean-Michael!” he called,
his voice frantic with fear.

Maggie pulled him away from the hatch and
shoved Zouzou into his arms. “I can fit through the opening,” she
said, shining the flashlight down into the dark well. The bottom
wasn’t visible but she could hear water falling on water. It was
filling up. She handed Laurent the flashlight and he boosted her to
the lip of the well. His hand squeezed her upper arm, as if he
might change his mind and pull her back, but she didn’t wait. She
stuck her feet against the slick sides of the aged cistern, her
hands resting on the rim, and shot down, her feet and hands sliding
down the sides.

“
Light, Laurent!” she
called, but the interior was illuminated before she finished
speaking.

Would that madwoman really
have put a baby in here?
She fell the final
ten feet to the bottom, her hands serving only to check her
descent. When her feet touched the floor, the water was up to her
knees. An icy fear raced up her spine.
If
he was in the well
…. She forced herself not
to finish the thought, instead dropping to her knees to feel the
rough floor of the well with shaking hands.

“
He’s not here!” she yelled
up to Laurent. The rain sluiced down her face, plastering her hair
to her head and neck. She bowed her head and screamed a long howl
of despair and frustration.

The long minutes ticked by as she waited for
Laurent to come back with a rope. She closed her eyes to the dark
and the cold—it was freezing fifteen feet into the ground—and
prayed.

When Laurent finally returned and threw the
rope down to her, she secured it around her waist and let him haul
her up, using her feet along the sides of the wall to try to walk
her way up. Once out, she lay panting at the foot of the well while
he wrapped a towel around her shoulders.

As soon as he touched her, she began to cry,
her strength seeping out of her. Her shoulders shook convulsively
with her sobs as he gathered her into his arms and held her
tightly. She knew he wanted to go, to look, to do anything but sit
here when Jem was in danger somewhere. She forced herself to push
Laurent away.

Plenty of time later to
grieve if it comes to that
, she thought
bitterly
.

“
We are not finished yet,”
he said in her ear as he helped her to her feet.

“
Oncle
Laurent,” Zouzou whimpered, wrapping her arms around his leg.
“Zouzou’s cold. I don’t like this game.”

Laurent lifted her up and spoke to her in
French, all the while his eyes searching the vineyard, the gardens,
even the roof of the house.

Jemmy could be anywhere.

“
Aunt Haley said we can’t
play the game in the rain,” Zouzou sniffled. “And I’m hungry. I
want my cocoa.”

“
What game?” Maggie said,
snapping her head in Zouzou’s direction. “What game of Aunt
Haley’s?”

“
She only does it with
Jemmy,” Zouzou said. “She says I’m too big.”

“
Where,
mon chou
?” Laurent asked her. “Where
do they play the game?”

“
Tu sait
,” Zouzou said. “In the swing in the orchard. The bough? I
know the song real good but she says I’m too big.”

“
Bring her!” Maggie called
over her shoulder as she dropped the towel and sprinted for the
orchard. Laurent had built a swing for Zouzou there, but just
possibly…

The orchard looked eerie and unwelcoming in
the dark and the rain. Maggie never came here. The apples were sour
and the trees themselves only good for making fragrant kindling in
the fireplace on winter evenings. She knew where Laurent had hung
the swing. It was the prettiest part of the orchard, affording a
view back down the hill of the house and the first quadrant of the
vineyard. Maggie found the swing and stopped. She turned back to
Laurent and Zouzou.

“
Where do they play the
game, Zouzou?”

The little girl pointed past Maggie to a
pair of apple trees, off the path and far back from where anyone
might take a pleasant after-dinner stroll. Maggie ran to the trees
and flashed her light at them. The rain was coming down harder now
and it served as a greater impasse to clear vision than even the
night did. She saw nothing.

In frustration, she raked the light from one
side of the two trees to the other.

“
Goddammit!” she said. “I
don’t see anything!”

Laurent strode past Maggie to the larger of
the two trees. The trunk forked in a deformed display of branch and
leaves. Maggie watched Zouzou turn to Laurent and talk but she
couldn’t hear her words. And then she saw Zouzou point to the
saddle of the forked trunk.

Maggie ran.

She pushed past Laurent and ran to the crux
of where the two trunks split at chest height and saw a cardboard
wine cask. It was dark and hidden by the leaves and the night.
Dropping the flashlight, she grabbed the box and lifted it away
from the tree, hearing water slosh around inside as the sodden
sides began to collapse in her hands.

Inside, his face just inches above the water
collected in the bottom, Jemmy opened his eyes and blinked as the
rain hit him in the face. He opened his mouth wide and began to
cry.

Epilogue

The crunch of the gravel beneath her shoes
always felt so satisfying, Maggie thought as she walked to the car
parked in the driveway. She shifted Jemmy to her other hip and
opened the car door. Grace followed her. She wore a long, flowing
dressing gown—like something from the forties, Maggie thought, with
her hair piled loosely on the top of her head and naturally still
gorgeous with not a speck of makeup on. Grace held a coffee cup to
her lips and watched Maggie tuck the baby into his car seat.